Twitter is getting serious about programmatic. Its recent moves – and reported moves – have included lead capture forms in the Twitter stream, CRM matching, and website retargeting. The latter two seem to follow directly in Facebook’s footstep. “It’s one area where they seem to be following Facebook’s lead,” comments David Berkowitz, chief marketing officer […]
Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer and newly inducted Twitter Ads API partner Voxsup is applying data science to social media to help brands smartly segment audiences. The company is VivaKi’s preferred partner for social insights and Facebook ad-buys, working alongside partner The Echo System. Drawing on algorithms developed at Northwestern University by CEO Alok Choudhary, the […]
“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Mark Zomick, managing partner of data integration at MEC North America. As the media landscape becomes more fragmented, sophisticated and ROI-driven, the need for clean, complete and accurate data […]
As companies grapple with the constant flow of incoming data, the demand for a data scientist — someone who can spot trends and pull insights from the data—continues to grow. Lauren Moores is the chief science officer at EveryScreen Media, a two-year-old startup that offers a real-time bidding platform and mobile audience targeting. AdExchanger caught […]
Once upon a time, ad agencies were masters of data. Which is to say, research. Before the internet, firms like Leo Burnett and The Martin Agency wielded – and still wield – sizeable research budgets, which they used to uncover demographic opportunities and strategic consumer insights. These insights were turned into big ideas and placed […]
With so many mobile apps in the marketplace, app discovery is more competitive than ever. The race to get apps in front of people has turned ad installs into a lucrative market. Combined with a huge mobile user base, Facebook’s Mobile App Install ads have emerged as a star ad product for the company. Approximately […]
BarkBox, the ecommerce subscription company catering to the canine-loving set, has “some pretty aggressive goals” for 2013, according to its Head of User Acquisition Marketing Rob Schutz. For one, the company wants to double its member base, which sits at 55,000 subscribers today. (Schutz says that if that subscriber-base hits the 1 million mark by […]
As the debate over the intersection of consumer privacy and online advertising rages, a recent announcement that browser maker Mozilla would work with Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society to create a “cookie clearinghouse” appears to have poured more fuel on the fire. Debuted by Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich’s blog on June 19, and then reiterated in […]
Adobe Systems’ $600 million acquisition of cross-channel marketing automation company Neolane begs the question: What is the use case for an advertiser, and how will the platform fit with Adobe’s stack? In the words of Suresh Vittal, Neolane’s chief product officer, Neolane helps solve campaign managers’ need to distribute content to the right audiences based […]
At a time when most of the established video-ad players are looking to serve as marketplaces catering to both buyers and sellers, LiveRail is strictly focused on publishers. The 6-year-old company, which began life as yield optimizer for publisher video inventory, now offers a broader set of supply-side platform tools. Sixty percent of the 4 […]
The mega-vendor wars continue. Today, Adobe Systems announced plans to acquire Parisian cross-channel marketing automation player Neolane for $600 million. The move comes weeks after cloud giant Salesforce.com said it would buy email and CRM vendor ExactTarget for $2.5 billion (AdExchanger story), part of a plan to “double down” on its Marketing Cloud strategy in the […]
Tremor Video has officially gone public, giving the company a valuation of $470 million or so based on the latest stock quote and 48.5 million shares outstanding (Amended S-1). In total, the company raised $75 million by selling 7.5 million shares for $10 a piece — below the previous target of $11 to $12 the […]
Specialty retailers are getting especially good at weighing the value of consumer behavioral targeting, but still have room to grow when it comes to mobile and, surprisingly, email strategies. According to L2’s newly released Digital IQ Index for Specialty Retail, more than half of specialty retailers are engaged in Facebook advertising, with “the majority of […]
Last week in Cannes, global leaders from the five biggest holding company trading desks convened for a panel discussion hosted by the Rubicon Project. The event took place on a rooftop against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea, while on the sidewalk below creatives scurried between beach parties and celeb-packed sessions at the Palais des […]
Disagreements continue between the advertising industry and privacy advocates as advertisers point to potential weaknesses in the “Cookie Clearinghouse” project that Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s have unveiled. The Cookie Clearinghouse promises to create two lists of domains: one for those that browsers would permit to […]
Facebook has made so many embellishments to its ad monetization machine in the past year that communicating it all to clients has become a big chore. This week in Cannes, the company participated in a “Creativity at Scale” panel and convened its 18-member Client Council to discuss its embrace of hashtags, its recent decision to […]
The moment for “convergence” between TV and online video is starting to seem more real, but video ad tech firm YuMe believes that programmatic sales methods won’t be a substantial part of the conversation around television-style branding campaigns for many years to come. “We do have a small amount of ad sales coming to us […]
Talking about data feels a bit transgressive in Cannes, where creativity is literally center stage. But with data driving so much change at agencies – including at creative shops – it seems an unavoidable topic. It came up frequently in a conversation on Tuesday with Americo Campos Silva, Shell’s Global Media Manager, and Sasha Savic, CEO […]
It’s been a little more than a year since Kepler Group was spun off (see AdExchanger’s Q&A) from MediaMath, where it had previously been the direct-to-client professional services group. So how’s it going for the world’s first independent agency to be incubated within a demand-side platform? Not bad at all. Kepler is hiring up and […]
One of the reasons that digital publishers like to talk about native is obvious: it resembles the age-old practice of high-priced “advertorials” and the natural customization of the placement dictates that marketers must deal directly with the site’s sales team. At the same time, those reasons have left agencies feeling frozen out by native ads, […]
AdExchanger is in the French Riviera, where some 12,000 people have gathered for the 60th annual Cannes Lions festival of creativity. We’ll have updates throughout the week, and a definitive (!) answer to the question, Can Big Data can play nice with the Big Idea? This morning Adobe hosted a discussion around advertising and trust, […]
While it was not mentioned at Apple’s WWDC keynote address earlier this week, the newest version of iOS includes a new privacy feature that pushes more advertisers into adopting its latest user tracking system. After Apple announced nearly two years ago that it was shutting down access to the unique device identifier (UDID), which many […]
Recounting an anecdote in his opening keynote yesterday at Merkle’s customer summit, Merkle CEO David Williams illustrated what a “game-changer” Facebook’s Custom Audience product has been for Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) companies like his. Williams said that Facebook executives initially told him it would not only never let email addresses match to Facebook login data […]
Facebook ad platform Blinq Media has made some big changes since Gannett bought it last year for an estimated $92 million. Among those changes is a potentially powerful tie-in with ShopLocal, the dominant player in digital ad circulars and Blinq’s corporate sibling at Gannett. The idea is to convince ShopLocal’s existing customers (national retail giants […]
The online ecosystem is different in Russia. Yandex is the search leader over Google; VK.com (originally VKontakte) and Odnoklassniki.ru are more popular social networks than Facebook. But when it comes to programmatic buying, the country looks similar to the US RTB circa 2011, thanks in part to the participation of Russia’s major internet players. The […]
“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Sacha Xavier, Partner, Media & Innovation Director for Neo@Ogilvy. One day I came to work and realized that everything had changed. My branch of the industry had upgraded from the […]
“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Rob Leathern, CEO of Optimal, Inc.. Having had the fortune (or misfortune) of being involved in online advertising product development over the past nine years, I’ve been able to […]
WPP Group’s trading desk Xaxis is known for its proprietary approach to technology. The GroupM unit has incubated numerous ad platforms, a legacy of WPP’s 2007 acquisition of 24/7 Media. It offers these products to clients as an alternative to licensing from vendors. By contrast, trading desk rivals VivaKi AOD (Publicis), Cadreon (IPG), and Accuen (Omnicom) are […]
Google remains on a warpath to drive industry-wide adoption of its ad tech “stack” strategy, positioning integration of past acquisitions as proof it is serving key constituencies. In March, Google called out the integration of Admeld and publisher direct sales. Today at its thinkDoubleClick client advisory board, it will highlight the inclusion of Wildfire (acquired […]
Salesforce.com has said it will acquire the digital marketing platform ExactTarget for $2.5 billion, making this the cloud software company’s largest acquisition to date. One driver of the deal was Oracle’s acquisition of marketing automation provider Eloqua last year. At the time, AdExchanger and others speculated that Salesforce.com would snap up ExactTarget or Eloqua competitor […]
